Cutting Through Life

     Today I saw a video of the ballet piece "En Puntas" by artist Javier Perez featuring a ballerina who sits atop a piano, puts her point shoes on and stands to dance. The catch is the woman's point shoes are attached to sharp knives. While she puts on the shoes there is a moment of dangerous seduction as she lifts her leg in the air and the audience wonders how she will possibly manage to stand.
    A rope hangs from the ceiling and she slowly struggles to pull herself up, wobbling while trying to find balance on the points.  She starts to move, slowly and rigidly she makes her way across the piano as the staccato sounds of the knives digging into the piano resonate throughout the theatre. The ballerina cries out in anguish and frustration as she struggles to move attempting to find the grace she had before she tried on the shoes. As she continues to dance you see the scars left on the piano she is dancing upon and in the final moments she stands still.

     Sometimes our lives are like this ballerina's dance. We try something new and choose to dance with it for awhile only to find it was not actually healthy for us. We struggle to find balance, grace and ease of movement in our lives but the problem is we keep trying to dance on knives. If we were only to take the shoes off we would be able to stand on solid ground and dance with joy and ease.